Knight-Mozilla OpenNews Community Call | October 24, 2012
Every-other Wednesday @ 11AM EDT - GMT 3PM
US or Intl. 1 650 903 0800 x 92 room 7679#
Canada 1 416 848 3114 x 92 room 7679#
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Agenda 10/24/12
IF YOU'RE NOT SPEAKING ON THE CALL, PLEASE MUTE YOUR LINE
ROLL CALL: Who's here?
* Nicola Hughes (@DataMinerUK)
* Dan Sinker (@dansinker)
* Dan Schultz (@slifty)
* @theCole
* @justinisaf (struggling to type this morning)
* Mike Ananny (@ananny)
* Jessica Lord (@jllord)
* Brian Boyer (@brianboyer)
* Erika Owens (@erika_owens)
* Phillip Smith (@phillipadsmith)
* John Keefe @jkeefe
* Ændrew Rininsland (@aendrew)
* Adam Nekola (@nekolaweb)
* Carlos Martínez (@cmdelaserna)
* Paul M. Davis (@paulmdavis)
* Mark Boas ('@maboa)
* Matt Terenzio (@mterenzio)
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TODAY:
Brian Boyer - NPR news Swing State app
* http://apps.npr.org/swing-state-scorecard/
* Released yesterday. Visualization of different election outcomes, but without relying on a map!
* Designed from the ground up with mobile in mind. Mobile, responsive design was part of plan at every stage.
* QUESTIONS:
* What's the underlying technology?
* Almost all underscore templates, and json/csv. Deployed on Amazon
* Forgot to give proper shout outs to Miso Dataset and Propublica's Stateface!!
* Other tech: jQuery, media queries, and some crazy CSS transforms to make the layout work
WNYC/KPCC CA Election Hackday reportbacks:
* Polished embed design: http://cl.ly/image/0E0S2R1f0o3y
* Testing underway! Live mockup of map embed, using fake data (and first pass at coding the degisn), is here: http://project.wnyc.org/election-2012-ca-results/
* Sample of public json file structure here: https://github.com/wnyc/election_california_2012/blob/master/examples/sample.json
* Github repository, in a very raw work-in-progress state: https://github.com/wnyc/election_california_2012
* OpenNews blog post coming later today
* JOIN US: If you're interested in updates and info, fill out this quick form: http://jkef.me/SsZeWT
* First OpenNews Code Sprint grant! More info on the grants: http://mozillaopennews.org/codesprints.html
* Held hack day last week: Built XML parser, data dvr system, design and functionality of a map
* Open data, so anyone can use it! (see github links above)
* QUESTIONS:
* How did the internal hack day model go? Would you do it again, differently?
* Team has started 20% model (a la Google), so this was a 20% option. 4 people joined. Opportunity for people to work with each other, social opportunity for people who usually work separately.
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Jessica Lord - sheetsee.js
* Source profile: http://source.mozillaopennews.org/en-US/articles/jessica-lord-sheetseejs/
* https://github.com/jllord/sheetsee.js
* http://jllord.github.com/sheetsee.js/
* sheetsee was built during/for CfA project: http://splost.codeforamerica.org (which is pretty janky in places, we're doing a lot of changes and adding content as I move it the City of Macon's servers later today, woo!)
* Javascript library mashup, born of a budget visualization kit for cities to use. Wanted to create something that could be managed by budget staff, not IT department. Starts with tabeltop, hooks with Google spreadsheet that budget staff can then update.
* QUESTIONS:
* It was built for city budgets, but have you thought about how else it can be used or seen it used in other places?
* Lots of civic hacking/journalism overlap, been brainstorming with other CFA folks. Still in the middle of working on the project for Macon, will complete that this week.
* Some news orgs with possible interest: Boston Globe, Huffington Post, Al Jazeera
* What is needed to set this up in a real-world environment (e.g. the Boston Globe) in terms of backends, support, skinning, etc.
* Someone could design a website with blank spots as holders for where information will get placed. And then you can decide where to plug the info into the website. Depends on how complicated you want to make it. A map and a pie chart would be pretty simple, for example.
2012 Fellow Updates
* Laurian (Fellow emeritus!)
* As BBC asked for a synchronised double UK map one day before my fellowship ended, I prototyped them, "volunteered" 2 extra days last week for them and Marina Shchukina used my prototype to implement this: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-19759650
* Freelancing now, these days working for a project the uses extensively OpenStreetMap, Mapbox/Tilemill, mapnik, postgis,GeoTiff altitude data and other map and routefinding things.
* I might work with http://decoded.co/ on a fork Mozilla Thimble in the near future.
* I might do some more maps for BBC in the future (contract or OpenNews code sprint grant related if they will apply...)
* I need to find time to work with Dan Schultz on some crazy projects he has.
* I need to find time to reflect, strategise and relax.
* I MISS CODING FROM AIRPORTS.
* nothing is stopping you from hopping on the heathrow express
* Dan
* Opened Captions: A live, hackable C-SPAN transcript.
* Source post: http://source.mozillaopennews.org/en-US/articles/introducing-opened-captions/
* Base demo: http://openedcaptions.com:3000
* Drunk-SAPN: http://openedcaptions.com/drunk-sapn
* https://dl.dropbox.com/u/3387820/full_transcript.html